About the Derek Walcott Collection

Derek Walcott is a St. Lucian poet and dramatist of international repute. He attended The University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica and lived for many years in Trinidad and Tobago, where he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. His literary output has won him many outstanding international awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

The first set of material acquired comprised the illustrations and set drawings for The Joker of Seville. The second installment, a substantial collection (manuscripts of plays, poems, correspondence, scrap books, photographs), covers the period when Walcott was based in Trinidad and Tobago and the establishment and activity of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, as well as much of his poetry and prose up to 1981. The third set of material acquired consists of the manuscripts for the poem Omeros.

The collection at UWI St. Augustine was purchased from Walcott in two tranches. In 1999 the University of Toronto acquired the literary papers relating to Walcott's poetic, theatrical and prose writings from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s.